The Girl Who Dreamed of Paris

by Natalie Meg Evans

  After coming out of the army, he’d got work as a theatrical scenery painter, which was how he’d met Cora’s mother. Soon, his drinking had started to lose him work, and after a few years, there wasn’t a theatre in London that would employ him. Florence had been earning well at the time, and she’d bought him a business from a man who was retiring, which specialised in enamelled folding screens. The sort found in superior dress shops and in wealthy people’s drawing rooms.

  Jac had taken to the work. Being alone all day, nobody to answer to, suited him and a flair for graphic art had put him in step with the new art-deco style of the twenties. He had developed his own motifs, featuring hummingbirds and luscious flowers and his work had become quite sought after. If he’d been anybody else, Cora thought, he’d be running a factory, perhaps from one of the new units on the Great West Road. They’d be living in a smart semi with a garden. But, being Jac, he insulted his suppliers, painted what he wanted, not what his customers asked for, and drank any profit he made.

  Even his shed radiated stubborn depression. No electricity, just hurricane lamps and a smelly paraffin stove.

  The light she’d seen came from the area he called his ‘paint-bay’, which was separated from the main workshop by a cowhide ­curtain. Behind the curtain he applied his paints and gold leaf, or sprayed surfaces with Japan-black lacquer, layer upon layer, until cheap pine panels resembled inlaid ebony.

  Cora heard a whisper and went to peer through a hole in the leather curtain. In the bluish light of the paraffin stove, she saw her father. He was sitting on the ancient club chair he’d bought from a junk shop. Side-saddle on Jac’s knee, her ugly policewoman’s hat tipped back, was Sheila Flynn. They had their arms around each other.

  Kissing! Cora’s mouth turned down in disgust. Her dad and Sheila Flynn gorging on each other’s faces! Jac’s hand was wedged inside Sheila’s jacket, under her shirt. As for her hand, it was where it definitely ought not to be.

  Cora closed her eyes and heard, ‘So, shall we tell her in the morning, Jac?’

  ‘Must we tell her at all?’ Jac’s voice was a rumble. Slurred but intelligible, which told Cora that he’d been drinking beer, not whisky. ‘Won’t it be obvious when we’ve gone?’

  Gone where? Cora opened her eyes and found a bigger hole to peer through. There was a selection because Jac had once hurled paint stripper at the curtain and it had burned through it, forming what looked like bullet holes. Oh, God, they were kissing again. Cora saw tea things laid out on the seat of a chair. A teapot and a tin mug, a rose-patterned china cup and saucer. Her mum’s teacup! A prized possession because it had been among the props used in The Importance of Being Earnest. How dare Sheila Flynn drink from it! Cora was about to wrench back the curtain when she heard Sheila say, ‘I’m going to give her hell for taking my things.’

  ‘Leave that to me,’ muttered Jac.

  ‘It’s only a rag, that dress, but what a cheek, going into my room. My best hat, too. And she’ll have seen all the other stuff.’

  ‘What stuff?’

  Sheila’s voice turned girlish. ‘I had a shopping spree. All the pocket money you give me gone on lovely things.’ It became a baby’s lisp. ‘Oo like me looking pretty, don’t oo, Jacky?’

  Too much. Cora hauled back the curtain, breaking a fingernail in her hurry to shine her torch into the lovebirds’ eyes. She was rewarded with a comical display of shock. Sheila got off Jac’s knee so fast that he yelped. She demanded, ‘How long have you been there?’

  ‘How long have you been fornicating with my dad?’ Cora shot back. ‘He’s still married to my mother, or had you forgotten?’

  Jac got up, stiff joints making him ungainly. ‘You’d better know, Cora, this woman is everything to me. Don’t you misuse her good name, not in my hearing. ’

  Sheila preened. See? her little smile implied. I’m the special one.

  Cora pointed the torch at her father. ‘How much is everything?’

  Sheila answered, ‘We’re getting married. We’re going to set up house in Barnham Street, so you’d better start looking for new lodgings.’

  ‘How can you marry him when Mum’s still alive?’

  ‘Divorce,’ Sheila said triumphantly. ‘The new law says three years’ desertion is grounds and your mother’s been gone a lot longer than that.’

  ‘But you’re Catholic,’ Cora lobbed back. ‘So’s Dad, when he can be bothered. You can’t believe in divorce?’

  Jac found his voice. ‘I believe in anything that will make me happy. Coming home to Sheila every night is all I want.’

  ‘But what about me? I don’t earn enough to take a place of my own.’

  ‘You’ll go into lodgings. Or,’ Sheila threw Jac a playful look, ‘she could rent my bedroom. Donal wouldn’t mind.’ Then, her gaze closing on the green silk dress, she bared her teeth. ‘You can pay to have that washed, Cora Masson, and I shall want new stockings, too. And where’s my hat?’

  ‘Who blew the gaff on me?’ Cora wasn’t playing for time. It was suddenly more important than anything to know if Donal had betrayed her. If he had, she hadn’t a true friend in the world.

  ‘Somebody left the key in the wardrobe and I heard you’d been hanging about the place. Since Donal wasn’t likely to be dressing up in my things, it had to be you. So? I’d say a fiver for a day’s hire. It should be twice that, except I know you’ll have lost all your money on one horse. You’ve no more sense than – what?’ Anger flared in Sheila’s eyes. ‘What have you got to grin at?’

  ‘You. I reckon that when it comes to being a self-righteous prig, you take the biscuit, Sheila Flynn.’ Cora gestured to her father, and took a deep breath. ‘When it comes to theft, he takes all the bloody biscuits. He’s been living off my earnings since I left school. Marry him? You need your head examined. He might say he’s in love and buy you a few fancy dresses, but give it a couple of years, you’ll be stuck with your arms in the wash-tub, looking forward to a black eye every Saturday night. Men like him—’

  They don’t change. It sighed through her mind, above the screeching wheels of a passing locomotive. The building shook and the roof panels made the noise of a saw cutting bones. He’s taken your life and he won’t change.

  The sound came not from within her head, but from the darkness in front of her feet. Obeying an impulse she didn’t fully understand, she flashed her torch beam over the floor bricks. Laid in herringbone pattern, fifteen years of Jac in his work-boots had pressed them into the soft earth. Something odd . . . an area in the middle had sunk in the shape of a church window, narrow at the top, wide at the bottom. ‘What’s under there, Dad?’

  ‘Salope!’ Jac spat the horrible word at her. ‘What right have you to question me? Sheila has told me everything about you, how you go with men – with sailors.’

  ‘I darn well don’t!’ One sailor only, and she’d really liked him. He’d been gentle.

  Jac hawked in her direction. ‘Stumbling on to the dock, looking for a tart to stick it in, they find you!’

  ‘That isn’t nice, Jac.’ Sheila crimped her lips, but her distaste was for Cora. ‘But now we’re speaking of it, you were seen on Coronation night, back in May, going with a boy off a ship—’

  ‘A filthy foreigner!’ Jac leaped in. ‘At least your mother whored with her own kind.’ Suddenly they were moving towards her. Had Jac seen something in her face to threaten him? Was he stoking his anger to justify an explosion of violence? Cora knew that her father meant to harm her and that Sheila wouldn’t stop him. If anything, Sheila’s coy smile was egging him on. Go on, Jac, she seemed to be saying. You’ve done it before.

  Cora saw the game’s end quite clearly. ‘Get out!’ a voice screamed in her head. She dropped her torch and ran. Outside, confused by the dark, she dithered, then let her feet do the thinking. She ran towards Bermondsey Street and Pettrew’s. If necessary, she could scale the factor
y wall and hide in one of the outbuildings. At Pettrew’s gates, she listened for the sounds of pursuit.

  All she could hear was her own heart. She said farewell to the chimneys and the forbidding, black windows, knowing she’d sewn her last hatband – never would she be assistant forelady under Miss McCullum.

  Chapter Three

  Paris, 16 June 1937

  Coralie de Lirac woke by degrees until the smell of laundered cotton reminded her that she was in her bedroom, in the Hôtel Duet. Banking her pillows behind her, she inhaled a waft of rose-attar. Thornless Zéphirine Drouhins in a vase on the dressing-table had transformed into organza crinolines as she slept.

  The moments before the day asserted itself gave her time to believe in her new existence. To those left behind in London, it must seem that Cora Masson had simply vanished. It was true. Cora Masson no longer existed.

  She mentally reassembled her surroundings, beginning with walls of watered silk, wedding-veil curtains and a Chinese carpet. A cream-painted armoire took up nearly a whole wall. There was a sitting room through an arch with deep-buttoned chairs and a sofa sprung like clouds. A pearly bathroom made her gasp each time she walked into it. When poor Cora Masson had wanted a good wash, she’d gone to the council swimming-baths.

  Outside, boulevard de Courcelles hummed with light traffic, which paused now and then to allow birdsong through. An elegant road to the north-west of Paris, it straddled the 8th and 17th arrondissements. Parc Monceau lay just across the street, where Coralie loved to walk early in the morning when the grass ­sparkled. She was learning how to be alone for the first time in her life.

  By mid-morning, impatient residents competed with tourists for pavement space. The Exposition Internationale was open for business, and according to the hotel porter – a man never without his copy of the newspaper Le Petit Parisien – up to 150,000 visitors swarmed through its pavilions each day.

  Hearing a knock, she called, ‘Entrez, s’il vous plaît.’ Speaking French was becoming second nature. Dietrich had accepted her story of being Coralie de Lirac, orphaned daughter of Belgian-French émigrés to London. On the train journey, he’d been curious about her millinery career, but hadn’t pressed when she’d brushed him off with ‘I make hats when I feel like it.’ In his world, it seemed to be normal for young women to take jobs for fun and drop them when more exciting prospects offered themselves. As for her fluency in French, which had amazed everyone she’d ever met in London – he spoke three languages and seemed to think it perfectly reasonable that she should speak two.

  He’d been unimpressed by her accent, however. ‘You sound like a kitchen maid. I shall send you to a teacher I know.’ So, twice a day now, Coralie crossed the Seine to converse with a Mademoiselle Deveau, whom Dietrich had met some years ago in Berlin. He’d been her pupil. ‘Anyone who can get Germans sounding their rs at the back of the throat and pronouncing -euille like a native will buff you up in no time.’

  Two two-hour lessons each day had brought Coralie’s French on fast, but such concentrated mental effort tired her. To relax, she always walked to Mademoiselle Deveau’s Left Bank flat, taking a different bridge each time so she could see Paris from new viewpoints. The hotel’s commissionaire would have called a taxi for her, and Dietrich provided her with cash for such essentials, but she loved exploring. Paris stone was the colour of unbleached flour, or of golden pastry. Roofs were all of uniform pitch, with dormer windows peering through the slates. First and second-floor balconies were black-metal lace. She even found herself admiring trees, lampposts, Métro canopies . . .

  ‘You are responding to the genius of Haussmann,’ Dietrich had told her. ‘He married stone with light to raise the eye from the pavement to the sky. For the trees lining the boulevards, thank Napoleon the Third. As for curly street furniture, you are admiring art nouveau.’

  Dietrich enjoyed educating her, when he had time. He was busy for much of the day, catching up with his many contacts. On their arrival, though, he’d devoted a whole day to her, taking her to the department store Printemps. Handing her over to a saleswoman, a vendeuse, he’d said, ‘Mademoiselle lost her luggage on the journey. Please ensure she has everything she needs.’

  For three hours the vendeuse had held her captive. The oversized armoire now held summer dresses, jackets and shoes. Her chest of drawers was full of gossamer lingerie so fine Coralie was reluctant to wear it.

  Soon, Dietrich promised, he would take her to his favourite couturier for clothes that would change her for ever. She’d objected. There was only so much change a person could take in one go, and he shouldn’t be spending money on her. Bringing her to Paris had been enough. But he seemed to take pleasure in it, and as for money, there didn’t seem to be any shortage.

  A maid set down a breakfast tray. ‘Bonjour, Madame. Vous avez bien dormée?’

  ‘Like a whippet that chased a bus all the way to Brighton.’ She answered in English because . . . well, good luck saying it in French. She answered the question differently each morning and the girl always laughed, though Coralie doubted she understood a word. After sweeping back the curtains, letting in a tidal wave of sunshine, the maid left. Coralie gave a long sniff.

  Good. No coffee. It had taken a week for the kitchen to cancel the coffee and send up tea. At first, they’d obliged with a pot of hot piddle. It had taken another week to get a brew that was the right shade of brown, with milk, not lemon. Lemon with pancakes, yes. A squeeze of lemon to rinse your hair or bring your windowpanes up sparkling . . . but in a cuppa? They had a lot to learn, the French. But they really knew how to make bread, and their croissants were beyond words. The hotel got those from a baker whose wares jumped from his oven on to your plate and were served with white butter and jam – called confiture – which bore no relation to the red paste she’d bought at the Barnham Street corner shop.

  Stop thinking about Barnham Street.

  She poured tea and piled her plate up, intending to slip back into bed before her nightgown grew cold. Only the telephone rang.

  ‘Battersea Dogs’ Home, Lady Basset speaking.’ She knew who it was, since only one person in Paris ever rang her. Except he wasn’t in Paris; he was in Germany on business. He’d left four days ago, saying that he was going first to Switzerland, then tracking back to Berlin. He wasn’t due in Paris until the day after tomorrow.

  ‘Good morning, Coralie. Did you get my roses?’

  ‘They came with dinner. Know something? Nobody has ever sent me roses before.’ Or any flowers, unless you counted a bunch of violets Donal had shoved at her one Easter-time—

  Don’t think about Donal.

  ‘I am glad to hear it. I wish to be the first with you for everything.’

  She bit her lip, wondering how he’d react if she told him that you can’t unscramble an egg or put the stalk back on a cherry. If the merchant vessel Antigone hadn’t sailed into Rotherhithe docks five weeks ago, she’d still be virgin-intact. But it had and, well, that was a conversation best left for later. ‘I’m having breakfast in bed. How about you?’

  ‘Lazy girl, I had mine hours ago. I get up with the sun. A habit from when I lived in the countryside and it amused me to walk to the nearest farm and shout in the cockerel’s ear to wake the wretch up.’

  She laughed. She liked the way Dietrich told her stories, even when he was talking about ordinary things. One of the nicest things he’d said in their first days together was that she made him think in pictures, not in straight lines.

  She’d puzzled over it. ‘Pictures – because I’m a dunce?’

  ‘You express yourself through imagery, which tells me your mind is that of an artist. I find that stimulating.’

  Shaken at being called an artist, she’d almost betrayed herself. ‘I only ever painted one picture, when I was five. It was for our school victory – I mean peace – parade to celebrate the end of the war. We had to daub something to do with
the armistice. I painted my dad in his armchair because that’s what I thought armistice meant. Nobody was impressed.’

  Dietrich had replied fiercely that schoolteachers had no business embroiling children in war or politics. The hazel eyes had iced over. ‘Politics, like wine and strong cheese, is an adult taste that should not be forced on the young.’

  She took a croissant and sat cross-legged on the bed. ‘Where are you? Still in Berlin?’ He had a flat there and a house in a town a little distance outside. His wife lived there, he’d told her, with their children, a boy and girl. She’d known Dietrich fifteen days now, if she counted Derby Day, and that was pretty much all she’d learned about him.

  ‘I’m in a café, on Leningrad, with a taxi waiting outside.’

  Leningrad? ‘I thought you were in Berlin.’

  ‘Rue de Leningrad. Less than ten minutes away. May I take breakfast with you?’

  Her heart pattered. She’d thought the line sounded clear! ‘I wasn’t expecting you back yet.’

  ‘I hoped you would be pleased. I wanted to see you. So?’

  ‘You said you’d already had breakfast.’

  ‘Hours ago, on the train. So?’

  ‘Of course.’ She could hardly keep him away. Didn’t want to keep him away. She’d been alone for four days, unless you counted Mademoiselle Deveau and the maid, and the woman who’d come in and styled her hair. Four days without a chat was a long time for a factory girl.

  Flicking crumbs off the bedspread, she wondered what to put on. One of her new dresses, or stay in her nightie? Pink slipper satin, it felt more like evening dress than nightwear. Only . . . she was completely naked underneath, which would scream invitation. On the other hand, she’d told him she was still in bed so it would look odd if she greeted him in a button-front dress and a cardigan.

  Sort yourself out, girl. Dietrich had settled her here because he wanted her company at night as well as during the day. He had taken a suite one flight up and an unexpected business trip had not altered the undeclared contract.